Intermediate Depth Image Generation using Disparity Increment of Stereo Depth Images

This paper proposes a method to generate a depth image at an arbitrary intermediate view-point, which is targeting a video service for free-view, auto-stereoscopy, etc. It assumes that the leftmost and the rightmost depth images are given and they both have been camera-calibrated and image-rectified. This method calculates and uses a disparity increment per depth value. In this paper, it is obtained by stereo matching for the given two depth image by considering more general cases. The disparity increment is used to find the location in the intermediate view-point depth image (IVPD) for each depth in the given images. Thus, this paper finds two IVPDs, from left image and from right image. Noises are removed and holes are filled in each IVPDs and the two results are combined to get the final IVPD. The proposed method was implemented and applied to several test sequences. The results revealed that the quality of the generated IVPD corresponds to 33.84dB of PSNR in average and it takes about 1 second to generate a HD IVPD. We evaluate that this image quality is quite good by considering the low correspondency among the left images, intermediate images, and the right images in the test sequences. If the execution speed is improved, the proposed method can be a very useful method to generate an IVPD at an arbitrary view-point, we believe.